Top 10 Female Entrepreneurs

Left to Right: Elizabeth Guezzale and Bradley Owen, Business Development Director. Courtesy Company

Courtesy Company

Courtesy Company

Courtesy Company

Courtesy Company

Courtesy Company

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Crystal Culbertson, Founder and CEO

Vicky Thompson, President and CEO

Jan Adams, President and CEO

Lisa Hufford, Founder and President

Elizabeth Guezzale, Founder and President

Anne Bahr, CEO

Shazi Visram, Founder and CEO

Veronica Edwards, President and CEO

Christine Do, CEO

Lisa Hogan, Owner and CEO

Crystal Clear Technologies
St. Petersburg, Fla.

No. 5
2010 Revenue: $16.4 million
Three-Year Growth: 16,048%

Crystal Culbertson’s company, which ranked at No. 549 on 2010’s Inc. 5000 list, specializes in information technology and data communications issues involving the federal government. Culbertson began her IT career as a logistics specialist at the United States Air Force’s Civil Engineering Support Agency. She founded Crystal Clear Technologies in 2002 with the stated purpose of providing technology support to the United States Armed Forces. “Our motto is ‘Serving Those Who Serve,”’ Culbertson said, “and as cheesy as it may sound that's the best part of the job.”

Valuation Management Group
Marietta, Ga.

No. 22
2010 Revenue: $25.4 million
Three-Year Growth: 7,910%

Vicky Thompson got into the appraisal business in 1993, but before that she worked for 18 years with Fleet Finance, where she ascended to vice president of operations before setting out to found Valuation Management Group in 2006. Thompson has said that she had to learn how to grow her business with little capital, but that the hard work has paid off. This year, her company was recognized by the Atlanta Business Chronicle with a Pacemaker Award as one of the city’s outstanding businesses.

JMA Solutions
Washington, D.C.

No. 45
2010 Revenue: $6.6 million
Three-Year Growth: 4,317%

Jan Adams didn’t start out as an entrepreneur. For 24 years, the JMA Solutions founder served in the United States Air Force, traveling around the world in the process and engaging in high-level military talks with her counterparts in the Soviet Union. She retired, and founded JMA Solutions in 2005. Now she works to provide federal clients with the staff they need at a cost they can afford.

Simplicity Consulting
Kirkland, Wash.

No. 56
2010 Revenue: $11.5 million
Three-Year Growth: 3,727%

Lisa Hufford became a consultant in 2006 after 14 years of corporate work. She left her job as a sales director at Microsoft to be “actively present” for her two sons, she wrote in the March 2011 issue of EO Magazine. Starting her own company helped her balance being a successful businesswoman and spending time with her kids, she said. With Simplicity Consulting, Hufford works to help businesses to develop personalized marketing strategies.

Cask
San Diego

No. 57
2010 Revenue: $8.9 million
Three-Year Growth: 3,714%

Though the federal government is now one of Cask’s biggest clients, Elizabeth Guezzale didn’t start the company with that in mind. She shifted the company’s focus from private to government clients when the recession began and private sector opportunities made themselves scarce. Guezzale, who worked as an independent contractor before starting Cask in 2004, has said she encountered some gender bias after entering the IT field, but that any discrimination she faced only encouraged her to work harder.

PetRays
The Woodlands, Texas

No. 65
2010 Revenue: $3.8 million
Three-Year Growth: 3,249%

Anne Bahr found her way to PetRays after holding a faculty position and overseeing the radiology residency program at Texas A&M University. A full-fledged intellectual who has won awards for papers with crunchy titles like “Quantitative Hepatobiliary Scintigraphy with Deconvolutional Analysis for the Measurement of Hepatic Function in Dogs,” Bahr became a doctor of veterinary medicine in 1992. Now she helps PetRays work with veterinarians to improve the efficiency of animal healthcare.

HappyBaby
New York City

No. 68
2010 Revenue: $13.3 million
Three-Year Growth: 3,207%

It was while listening to a friend talk about the difficulty of finding nutritious meals for babies that Shazi Visram found the idea for her company, HappyBaby. She wasn’t a mother herself at the time. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she attended Columbia as an undergraduate, and returned to complete her business education, earning her MBA in 2004. “I am always looking for a better way to do something,” she said in an alumni magazine profile in 2007. Visram now has an eighteen-month-old-son, Zane.

InGenesis Diversified Healthcare Solutions
San Antonio

No. 126
2010 Revenue: $52 million
Three-Year Growth: 2,177%

Veronica Edwards has long called San Antonio her hometown, and it’s where she decided to start her telecommunications staffing company, InGenesis Diversified Healthcare Solutions shifting the company’s focus to the healthcare industry later. A holder of degrees from three universities, Edwards was recognized in 2010 as an alumna of distinction by her undergraduate alma mater, the University of the Incarnate Word, also located in San Antonio. A director on a number of healthcare-related boards, Edwards still makes time to encourage high school students to pursue careers in the healthcare field.

Soft Tech Consulting
Chantilly, Va.

No. 127
2010 Revenue: $7.4 million
Three-Year Growth: 2,138%

At 17, Soft Tech Consulting founder Christine Do was forced out of war-ridden Saigon by the American withdrawal from the Vietnam War. Her family immigrated to the United States and found their way to a small town in upstate New York, where they made a home. Today her company provides a range of technology consulting services from its offices near Washington, D.C. “I think coming to the U.S. and leaving everything behind was actually the best thing that could happen to our family,” Do told Inc. in 2010, when she was chosen as one of the Top 10 Asian Entrepreneurs.

Glevum Associates
Burlington, Mass.

No. 141
2010 Revenue: $11.3 million
Three-Year Growth: 2,008%

As owner and CEO of Glevum Associates, Lisa Hogan oversees the company’s efforts to conduct social research in some of the world’s most tumultuous regions. The company was given a grant recently by the federal government to undertake projects in Afghanistan. Glevum Associates uses techniques from the social sciences to provide information on regions around the globe, and has offices in Kabul and Baghdad, as well as Burlington and Gloucester, Mass.